By Phil Okose, Onitsha
Government at the federal and state should be blamed for the incessant brain drain among the Nigerian youths, businessman, Chief Simeon Nnakwe has asserted.
Nnakwe also noted that unless the Federal Government provides employment, the menace will continue.
The international businessman made the call in a ceremony marking his 45th birthday in Onitsha, Anambra State.
Consequently, he pleaded with the Federal Government to direct its appropriate agencies to provide gainful job opportunities for the youth to discourage them from leaving the country en mass.
“The common trace to the brain drain is the inability of the Federal and state governments to provide employment opportunities and enabling environment where both small scale and big businesses could thrive,” he noted.
Nnakwe equally challenged government among other things, to design possible measures to checkmate the current internet crime wave among some youths in the country.
He explained that the Federal Government has failed to play one of its major roles as it concerns employment, security of lives and properties.
According to him, a situation where the youths constantly leave Nigeria for other countries without quality education and employable skills was not good for the nation and its image abroad.
He reminded the government that allowing unskilled youths or people without functional and qualitative curriculum vitae to travel abroad would drag the image of the country in the mud.
The acclaimed businessman said that sending people who have no relevant or sound employable academic certificates abroad was an indirect way of encouraging criminality and other social vices in the immigrants’ host countries.
As part of measures to arrest the situation, he urged the government to revive several moribund industries and companies and also to set up new ones, noting that the youth leave the country in droves for lack of gainful job opportunities.
He further expressed displeasure with the criminal disposition of some youths abroad which he noted to have brought bad image to the country.
Nnakwe said with such, it was very hard for some Nigerians abroad to boldly introduce themselves as Nigerians.
The property expert is also worried about the extent some youth abandoned education for fraud, popularly called “Yahoo” businesses which he also blamed on unemployment and wrong notion that education is a scam.
Condemning the “Yahoo, Yahoo” syndrome, Chief Nnakwe entreated the Federal Government to find ways to bring a permanent cessation of the practice.
He, however, chided some parents who he directly accused of intentionally encouraging their unskilled and scantily educated children to go abroad, adding that such people invariably would start stealing, because, in his words, “they lack entrepreneurial empowerment.”
He cautioned that parents who usually expressed joy that their children were making money out of dubious means to rethink on the curses they were heaping upon their children.
Nnakwe consequently warned the youth to desist from any form of criminality and duplicity, telling them that they would someday suffer the adverse effects of their present actions.
The philanthropist who used to sponsor people overseas declared at the event that he has stopped sponsoring anybody without relevant skills or good education abroad.
“If you have learned a trade and probably you need a help to go to school, I can help, if I have the resources, but coming to me to tell me one story or the other, I am not going to help”, he emphasized.
He remarked that if nothing was done urgently to halt the way the youth of the present generation were going after money, “we will soon lose them”.